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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Herbert Aptheker (July 31, 1915 – March 17,
2003) was an American Marxist historian and political
activist. He authored over 50 volumes,
mostly in the fields of African
American history and general U.S. history, most
notably, American Negro Slave Revolts (1943), a classic in
the field, and the 7-volume Documentary History of the Negro
People. He was a prominent figure in U.S. scholarly discourse since the 1930s.

Contents

Biography

Aptheker was born in Brooklyn, New York, the last child of a wealthy Jewish family. In 1932, when he was 16,
he accompanied his father on a business trip to Alabama. There he learned first-hand about the
oppression of African
Americans under Jim Crow Laws in the South, and was appalled by what
he saw. On his return to Brooklyn, he wrote a column for his school
newspaper on the "Dark Side of The South."

Six years later, after obtaining a B.A. degree from Columbia
University, Aptheker went back to the South and became an
educational worker for the Food and Tobacco Workers Union. Shortly
afterwards, he served as secretary of the Abolish Peonage
Committee. "Peons", the vast majority of whom were African
American, were tied to plantations by the debt they owed to the
plantation owners. This practice effectively maintained slavery beyond the Civil War
in all but name.

In 1939, Aptheker joined the Communist Party USA, which, he
believed, was the U.S. political party that took the strongest
position on full economic, social, and political equality for
African Americans. During World War II, he joined the Army, taking
part in Operation Overlord; by 1945 had
reached the rank of Major in the
artillery, which
commission he lost in December 1950 after failing to respond to the
U.S. Army’s letter of inquiry about his Communist political
activity.

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Research in African
American history

Aptheker's master's thesis, a study of the 1831 Nat Turnerslave revolt in Virginia, laid the groundwork
for his future work on the history of American slave revolts.
Aptheker uncovered Turner's heroism, demonstrating how his
rebellion was rooted in the exploitative conditions of the Southern
slave system. His doctoral dissertation, American Negro Slave
Revolts, was published in 1943. Traversing Southern libraries
and archives, he uncovered 250 similar episodes through exhaustive
research. It remains a landmark and a classic work in the study of
Southern history and slavery.

Aptheker challenged racist writings, most notably those of Georgia-born historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, who
cast African Americans as child-like, inferior, and uncivilized;
argued that slavery was a benign institution; and defended the
preservation of the Southern plantation system. Such works were the
consensus in the field until Aptheker's scholarship tore them
apart.

Aptheker considered himself a protégé of W. E. B. Du
Bois, and long emphasized his mentor's social science scholarship and life-long
struggle for equality as an African American.

Post-war
activism

In the 1950s, Aptheker was blacklisted because of his membership in
the Communist Party, and was unable to obtain appointment as a
university lecturer throughout the decade. Aptheker served on the
National Committee of the CPUSA from 1957 to 1991; for several
years in the 1960s and 1970s, he was executive director of the
American Institute For Marxist Studies.

A fervent opponent of the Vietnam War, Aptheker lectured on the
subject on college campuses nationwide. He saw U.S. conduct in
Vietnam as a war of aggression against an
exploited peasantry
determined to win their independence and control of their land. He
saw many parallels between African American slaves and
sharecroppers in the South, and the Vietnamese working class and
peasantry, from which the guerrilla fighters of the National Liberation Front (known in the
U.S. as the "Viet Cong") drew most of their ranks.

Aptheker died in 2003 at the age of 87.

Family
issues

Aptheker's wife, Fay, was also a union organizer. Their
daughter, Bettina, was raised as a "red diaper baby". Bettina
Aptheker is now a professor of feminist studies
at the University of
California, Santa Cruz. In her 2006 memoir, Intimate
Politics, she claims that she was sexually molested by her father from the
age of 4 to the age of 13. However, her charges are based on recovered memory and dissociation[1] and
so have been called into doubt.[2][3] For
example, Mark Rosenzweig writes "the truth about Herbert and
Bettina is inaccessible to us."[4] She
also tells about their highly emotional reconciliation several
years before his death. In addition, she claims that her father's
celebrations of black resistance were attempts "to compensate for
his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted
during the Holocaust" (which has been criticized as "possibly
antisemitic"[2]),
and says that he "lived much of the time in a fantasy world of his
own making".